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This is the fourth installment in a series on using the Blackboard Grade Center. The first installment, Getting Ready discussed the general idea of Grade Center and provided instructions on what to do in preparation for Grade Center configuration. The second installment, Initial Setup introduced the Grade Center itself, and provided instructions on how to configure categories and columns. The third article, Do the Math! explains how to create and manage calculated columns. This post provides helpful tips on tweaking the Grade Center using the Column Organization tool.

Introductory Notes

This tutorial demonstrates how to toggle the visibility of columns and how to use the Grade Center’s “Column Organization” tool to tweak the display of the Blackboard Grade Center. This assumes that a fully functioning Grade Center has already been configured. If you’re reading this and don’t have a functioning Grade Center set up yet, you may want to revisited one of the previous posts in this series (see above).

The Scenario….

I’m teaching the same course I taught last semester. Before the semester started, I copied the content from the previous semester’s section into my new Blackboard section. This semester, I only want to have 9 graded homework assignments, rather than the 10 I had last semester. How do I get the extra column out of the grade center?

This is not an uncommon question and the answer is quite simple.

There are two ways to go about it.

Option 1: Deleting a Grade Center Column

Simply delete the column from the Grade Center. To do this,

Go to the Grade Center (the main grid) in your Blackboard course.

Locate the column you want to hide.

Click on the action arrow at the top of the column.

Select “Delete Column” from the dropdown menu.

However, if the Grade Center column is associated to a Blackboard Assignment, the assignment must be deleted first.

NOTE: THIS ACTION WILL DELETE THE COLUMN.

I know, that’s pretty self-explanatory, but I just wanted to throw in that caveat. The column will be gone, vanished, “poof”!! So make sure you really want it gone!!

OR…. you could go with option #2….

Option 2: Hiding a Grade Center Column

Rather than deleting the column, this option will make it unavailable so that it can be reused later.

STEP 1 – Toggle Column Visibility for Students

Adjusting the visibility of columns in the Grade Center can be a bit frustrating if not done properly. Due to some purposes that I’ve yet to fully comprehend, Blackboard will allow you to make a column visible to students yet hide it from yourself (the instructor). The logic behind that ability evades me. But, I’ve never claimed to be the sharpest tool in the shed, so there could very well be a reason that I don’t get.

To hide columns from students in the grade center:

Go to the Grade Center (the main grid) in your Blackboard course.

Locate the column you want to hide.

Click on the action arrow at the top of the column.

Select “Hide from Students (on/off)” from the dropdown menu.

Columns hidden from students are displayed with an orange slash to the left of the column name.

To make the column visible to students, simply repeat the steps outlined above.

STEP 2 – Toggle Column Visibility for Instructors

Now that the column has been hidden from students, you want to hide it from yourself so that it doesn’t annoy or confuse you in the future.

To hide a column from the instructor view of the grade center:

Go to the Grade Center (the main grid) in your Blackboard course.

Locate the column you want to hide.

Click on the action arrow at the top of the column.

Select “Hide from Instructor View” from the dropdown menu.

And that’s it. The column won’t be around to bother you any longer. But, of course, if you need to, you can go in and make the column visible again. And this brings us to to main point of this article….

Column Organization

Now that we’ve discussed deleting and hiding columns, let’s dig in a little deeper and look at one of the most powerful screens for configuring Grade Center display settings; Column Organization. To access Column Organization, hover over the “Manage” drop-down and select “Column Organization” from the menu.

The Column Organization screen allows you to:

Show or hide columns.

Change a column’s category.

Rearrange columns.

This won’t give you the power to do every single tweak imaginable to your Grade Center, but it will definitely get you started down the right path.

The Screen

Pictured to the right, the Column Organization screen allows instructors to configure the appearance and configuration of the Grade Center. The screen presents the grade center columns in list view with the left-most column appearing at the top of the list. Columns that are visible in the main Grade Center screen are in black, while columns that are hidden from the main Grade Center screen are in grey.

Showing / Hiding Columns

To show or hide a Grade Center column,

Select the column by clicking on the checkbox to the left of the column.

Hover your mouse pointer over the “Show/Hide” menu (at the top and bottom of the Column Organization screen).

Select the desired action (“Hide Selected Columns” or “Show Selected Columns” from the menu.NOTE: Changes will be made immediately on the screen, but will NOT BE PERFORMED until the “SUBMIT” button has been clicked. So, by all means…

Click the Submit button (located at the top and bottom of the Column Organization screen).

This will return you to the main Grade Center view, and you will note that the changes you made are reflected in the Grade Center screen.

Changing a Column’s Category

In part two of this series (Initial Setup), I covered how to configure categories and how to assign a category to grade center column. Typically, those things won’t change, but once in a while you may find it necessary to change the category with which an assignment was associated. From the Column Organization screen, it is very simple.

Select the column that is to be changed by clicking on the checkbox to the left of the column name.

Click on the button (located at either the top or the bottom of the Column Organization screen.

Select the new category for the column.

Click the Submit button.

Rearranging Grade Center Columns

To rearrange Grade Center columns (it’s really really simple),

Click on the cross-arrow icon to the left of the item you’d like to move and hold down the mouse button.

Drag the item to the desired location.

Release the mouse button.

I know, those are pretty complicated instructions….
Here’s an animated gif that demonstrates the process.

Now what?

So that’s pretty much it for hiding/deleting columns and using the Column Organization screen to tweak the Grade Center.

The next installment, “But Wait, There’s More!” will cover a few additional topics that didn’t quite fit anywhere else, but are still good to know about. Things like SmartViews, Grading Schemas, Color Coding, and Exporting grades to a spreadsheet.

As always, thanks for stopping by, and if you have any questions, comments, concerns, or (gentle) criticisms, please feel free to reach out.

This is the third installment in a series on using the Blackboard Grade Center. The first installment, Getting Ready discussed the general idea of Grade Center and provided instructions on what to do in preparation for Grade Center configuration. The second installment, Initial Setup introduced the Grade Center itself, and provided instructions on how to configure categories and columns. This installment deals with creating and managing calculated columns.

Introductory Notes

For the sake of simplicity, I’m dividing this post into two sections, Points and Percentage, as your Grade Center calculations will depend entirely on which method you use. Neither method is better nor worse than the other. They both have strengths and weaknesses and at the end of the semester, they all morph into A’s,B’s,C’s,D’s, or F’s.

The point is that if you’re using points, just read the Points section of this tutorial. If you’re using percentage based calculations, then just read the Percentage part.

If You’re Using A Points-Based Grade Center

If you completely followed the steps in parts one and two of this guide, then you’ve got everything in place for a Points-based grade center. The TOTAL column should represent an accurate total for the course. In the next installment of the series, I’ll discuss how to review this and make adjustments if necessary. But at this point, if you’re using a points-based Grade Center and have assigned the correct values to each graded activity column, then the TOTAL column should be right. So just hang back and wait for the next installment of the series (which will be coming in just a couple of days).

If You’re Using A Percentage-Based Grade Center

In part two, I demonstrated how to create categories and columns then discussed how to associate those columns to the appropriate categories. Now, it’s time to configure the WEIGHTED TOTAL column, which is where we associate the values to the categories and perform the actual calculations.

In Blackboard, go to the Full Grade Center. Once the Grade Center loads, click the action arrow for the WEIGHTED TOTAL column and select “Edit Column Information” from the drop-down menu.

The ‘Edit Weighted Column’ screen will then load. From this screen, you will be able to configure the column to accurately calculate the grades for your percentage-based Grade Center.

The image below provides an example of the first part of the ‘Edit Weighted Column‘ screen. Note: You can change the Column Name to anything you choose. You may also change the Grade Center Name as well. “Grade Center Name” is what displays at the top of the column in the Grade Center. If there is nothing in the “Grade Center Name” field, the column will display the Column Name by default. If you do change the the Grade Center Name, make sure it’s set to something short, otherwise, it won’t fit in the column heading and could cause confusion if you have similarly named columns.

The Description area is populated with default text which you can modify or delete.

Beneath the Description box are the Primary and Secondary Display options. You may choose from any two of the display options (Percentage, Points, Letter, Text, or Complete/Incomplete). A common combination is the Percentage for the Primary and Letter for the Secondary Display.

Whatever combination you choose, they will display in the following format:Primary (Secondary)

So, if you chose Percentage as Primary and Letter as Secondary it would appear like this:93.00% (A)

Now that we’ve got the display options out of the way, let’s get down to the nitty gritty… let’s get this show on the road.

Configuring Calculations

Section 3 of the Edit Weighted Column screen is where you will configure the actual calculations. If you configured the individual columns using categories, it’s pretty simple to do.

First, select the category from the “Categories to Select” list. When you select a category, the assignments associated with that category are displayed in the “Category Information” box just beneath the category list. This will help you make sure you’re selecting the correct category.

Second, once you’ve selected a category, click on the > button just to the right of the “Categories to Select” box.

Once you’ve clicked the > button, the category will appear in the Selected Columns box. Enter the weight for the category in the % Category box (as shown below). If you plan on dropping the lowest x grades, enter the number of grades to drop in the Drop _ Lowest box. After you’ve added a value for a category, you’ll notice that the total weight is displayed just beneath the Selected Columns box.

Repeat this process with each category.

The Calculate as Running Total radio buttons beneath the Select Column section is of critical importance.

If Yes is selected, then any assignments which don’t have grades (assignments which ave not been submitted or graded) will not be included in the calculations.

If No is selected, any assignments that have not been submitted or graded will be calculated as zeroes.

NOTE: If you select “Yes” you’ll need to make sure that you enter “0” grades for unsubmitted work.

Click the ‘Submit’ button to apply the new configuration.

So that’s it?

Yes and no. The Grade Center has been configured, but it’s not quite complete. You’ll probably want to make a few tweaks here and there, hide some unwanted columns, put things into a different order, etc. So yes, the bare bones Grade Center is ready. The next installment in this series will show you how to make those little tweaks so that your Grade Center is just exactly perfect.

This is the second in a six-part series on the Blackboard Grade Center.

In the first installment of this series, I discussed what needs to be in place BEFORE setting up a Blackboard Grade Center. Once you’ve completed those steps and have a clearly defined Grade Center configuration, you’re ready to dive into Blackboard and make your vision a reality!

Just a couple of notes before we get started…

First, this guide is intended for faculty who don’t teach online and who are using Blackboard as a supplement to their face-to-face courses. While the steps are the same, faculty who teach online will notice that their Grade Center is populated by columns for discussions, assessments, and assignments as they are created, so they won’t see the tabula rasa that I demonstrate below.

Second, the examples I use are from our Blackboard system at MCCC. Your Grade Center may include different columns by default or may have a different color scheme. Disregard all of that. The concepts are still the same.

To access the Blackboard Grade Center, log into Blackboard (duh), go to the course you’ve been assigned and click on “Grade Center” in the course menu on the left-hand side of the screen. From the menu that will appear, select “Full Grade Center.” This will load the complete Blackboard Grade Center.

When you first start out, there isn’t a whole lot to see. Just some buttons across the top and some column headings. Not very exciting, right? Fear not. It will become quite exciting in short order.

SOME INITIAL HOUSEKEEPING

If you look at the section where your actual grades will go, the only two columns that would contain grade data are the default, pre-generated, WEIGHTED TOTAL and TOTAL columns. Before we go any further, let’s get rid of You’re only going to need one of them, so let’s get rid of the one we’re not using.

If you’re using aPOINTS based grade center, DELETE the WEIGHTED TOTAL column. To do this, click on the arrow at the top of the column (that arrow shall henceforth be known as the “action arrow”) and select “Delete Column” from the menu.

If you’re using a PERCENTAGE based grade center,delete the TOTAL column, but this is a little trickier, as the TOTAL column is configured as the “External Grade” by default. Basically, the “External Grade” column is the one that has been designated to represent the final grade for the course and there can only be one of those (obviously). Also, you can’t just go around deleting the final grade column, so you must remove the “External Grade” designation from the column before you can delete it.To designate the WEIGHTED TOTAL column as the “External Grade” column, click on the action arrow for the WEIGHTED TOTAL column, and select “Set as External Grade” from the drop-down menu.

Now that we have the WEIGHTED TOTALcolumn designated as the External Grade for the Grade Center, we can remove the unnecessary TOTAL column from the grade center. Same as above, click on the action arrow for the TOTAL column, and click the “Delete Column” link from the bottom of menu.

ESTABLISHING CATEGORIES

Using the examples I created in the first installment of this series, we’re going to create some categories for the Grade Center. That category configuration looked like this….

Ultimately, these categories will be configured in the “WEIGHTED TOTAL” column, but before we can do that, we need to create the categories in the Grade Center. To do this, hover your mouse pointer over the ‘Manage’ drop-down button (just above the row of column headers we were just working with), and from the drop-down menu that appears, select “CATEGORIES”

Once the “CATEGORIES” screen loads, you’ll find that seven pre-defined categories are already waiting for you. The categories can be used for calculations, but they cannot be deleted or edited. They can, however, be ignored, which is what I’m going to do in this tutorial. You see them in the image below, but I will not be using them for this tutorial. You can use them if you’d like. There’s no harm in doing so, but for the purposes of this tutorial, I thought it better to create fresh categories that specifically match the grading breakdown above.

The default Blackboard ‘Categories’ screen.

Creating one’s own categories is quite simple. Just click on the “CREATE CATEGORY” button, then provide a name and (optional) description for the category, then click the ‘SUBMIT’ button.

Once you’ve created the category, you’ll be taken back to the main CATEGORIES screen, where you can repeat the process above to create all the categories for the course.

Once you’ve finished the process, it will look something like this. Take a moment to marvel at your work, then click on the “OK” button to move on to the next step.

CREATING COLUMNS

For instructors who are inheriting a course or who already have content configured inside their Blackboard shell, you may find that you already have columns configured in the Grade Center. For this tutorial, we’re working with a tabula rasa, in which there are no pre-configured assignments. But I wanted to mention it just in case your Grade Center looked a little different from mine.

Now that we’ve created grading categories as outlined in the syllabus, it’s time to move on to create columns for each graded activity in the course. You can add columns during the semester as you come up with new assignments, or you can manually add them all at once prior to the start of the semester.

PLEASE NOTE: If students are submitting work in the Blackboard environment (to an Assignment, Test, or Discussion Forum) then those individual elements will automatically have Grade Center columns generated when you create them. This tutorial assumes that students will be handing in work in class and not submitting it via Blackboard. In the end, it all works out the same way, but I wanted to mention that so that you didn’t manually create a column for something that already had a column automatically created by Blackboard.

FOR A GRADE CENTER TO BE ACCURATE, EACH GRADED ACTIVITY IN THE COURSE MUST HAVE A CORRESPONDING COLUMN IN THE BLACKBOARD GRADE CENTER.

So, looking at the calculation configuration outlined above, let’s make some assignments….

For this course, students are graded on:

Attendance (5%) (many instructors keep a single column for attendance and populate it at the end of the semester).

Homework (15%) (10 assignments)

Quizzes (10%) (10 quizzes)

One of each of the following:

Research Paper (25%)

Mid-Term Exam (15%)

Final Exam (30%)

Now, using this information, I’m going to create 24 columns in the Grade Center, one for each graded assignment. (No, I’m not doing screenshots for all 24, just for 1 of them.) 🙂

To create a Grade Center column, click the “CREATE COLUMN” button in the Grade Center. and complete the form that loads.

In the screenshot above, you’ll see that three areas are highlighted. These sections MUST be completed FOR EACH GRADED ACTIVITY in order for your Grade Center to function properly.

Column Name: I don’t think I need to explain what a name is. Just be concise and clear with your naming. Use the same conventions as you go along.

Category: The Grade Center won’t calculate data properly if the activities aren’t assigned to the appropriate categories. Make sure you select the category that this particular activity falls into

Points Possible: It’s a graded activity! How much is it worth? What’s the highest score someone could possibly achieve on this assignment?

IF YOU ARE USING A PERCENTAGE-BASED GRADE CENTER, you should be using 100 as the highest possible score here. You can use some other value, but it’s easier to track 0-100 scores in a percentage-based grade center.

IF YOU ARE USING A POINTS-BASED GRADE CENTER, you need to make sure you enter the correct point values for each assignment.

There are other options that can be configured (Due Dates, Rubrics, etc.) but this is a basic, introductory tutorial, so we’re not going into all that fun stuff at this point.

Once you’ve got your information entered, click the “Submit” button to save your work. Repeat the process and create a Grade Center column for each graded activity in your course.

THAT’S SO COMPLICATED!!

It’s not as bad as you think, I promise. There will be a little bit of a learning curve as you navigate the screens for the first time, but, as with most things in life, the more you work with it, the easier it will become.

In the next installment of this tutorial series, we’ll go into actually calculating the grades.

So, your homework between now and then is to create the categories in Blackboard, then create Grade Center columns for each graded activity in your course.

Introduction

This tutorial series is designed to assist faculty who are just starting to use the Blackboard Grade Center to keep track of student grades. While this series may be helpful to faculty who are teaching a fully online course, this series is written specifically for faculty who are using Blackboard as a supplement to their face-to-face course.

A little background…. If you’ve read this blog before, you know that I’m the Blackboard admin for Mercer County Community College in West Windsor, NJ. Recently, we made Blackboard available to all courses, and as such, we’ve seen an influx of faculty who are hoping to use the system to track student grades. These tutorials are designed to assist those faculty who are new to Blackboard to configure and use the Grade Center tool to track student performance in their classes.

The series will contain 6 tutorials:

Getting Ready (this post): Introduces the series, explains the concepts being covered, and outlines exactly what faculty will need before getting started.

Initial Setup: How to set up assignment categories in Blackboard and how to create Grade Center columns for individual assignments.

Now that I’ve got the pesky little introduction out of the way, let’s cover the first part…

Are you ready to get ready?

Before you set out to tackle your Grade Center configuration in Blackboard, you need to have a solid grasp on how your Grade Center will be configured. It’s much more complicated to retrofit a Grade Center due to poor planning than it is to take the time, map it out, and configure it correctly from the start. So save yourself the headaches and confusion of trying to fix it.

Here’s what you’ll need:

Pick one: Points or Percentage? Decide if you’re using a Points or Percentage based Grade Center. You can’t mix and match here. It has to be one or the other.

In a points-based system, students start with 0 points and with each completed assignment, accumulate points throughout the semester. High stakes assignments (like mid-terms or finals) will be worth more points than weekly quizzes or homework assignment, and that can be controlled on the assignment level. So, if the homework for Week 6 is more complex and more deserving of value than the homework assignment for other weeks, you can just make it worth more points.EXAMPLE:

In a percentage-based system, categories are clearly defined and assigned specific weights. The sum of all percentages must be 100%.EXAMPLE:

Attendance = 5%

Homework = 15%

Quizzes = 10%

Research Paper = 25%

Mid-Term Exam = 15%

Final Exam = 30%

Once you’ve made a decision, write it out! As outlined above, your grading system should be clearly elaborated. Blackboard’s Grade Center doesn’t handle nebulous concepts well, so make sure you’ve got everything written down.

If you’re using extra credit or are dropping lowest x grades in a particular category, make sure you make special note of this, as they will come into play later. (I’ll be handling Extra Credit in the “Do the Math” post in this series.)

Assignments for each category (Percentage-based systems): All of these wonderful categories are useless if we don’t have any assignments in them! Make sure that each graded assignment in the course belongs to one (and only one) defined category.

A syllabus with a clearly defined grading system that matches the Grade Center configuration: Your Grade Center and your Syllabus MUST MATCH. If you provide students with one grading configuration in the syllabus, but use a different one in the Grade Center, you are begging for problems.

Now what?

In the next installment of this series, I’ll be discussing how to put this all into Blackboard for the first time.

Thanks for stopping by, and as always, questions, comments, concerns, or (gentle) criticisms are welcome.